A company at Industry Coworking just landed a $5.3 million investment

You don’t see a ton of Charlotte tech startups landing multi-million-dollar investments — yet. But DealCloud is showing not only that it can be done, but how a startup can use Charlotte as an advantage in business.

DealCloud was founded in 2010 and spun out of the prestigious Falfurrias Capital Partners. The company still counts Hugh McColl and Marc Oken (the former CEO and CFO of Bank of America) as advisors.

Essentially, what DealCloud does is provide software that manages a merger or acquisition through the deal process. Clients include private equity firms, banks and publicly traded companies — companies that do a lot of deals.

Photo via Rob Cummings

The company just announced a $5.3 million equity investment led by Cultivation Capital, a St. Louis venture capital firm, and Hamilton Lane, an alternative investment company.

Along with the money comes a new leader: Rick Kushel is joining the company as CEO. He has years of experience in the industry, most recently at cloud-based private capital portfolio monitoring firm iLevel. That company was purchased in August (for an undisclosed price) by financial technology firm Ipreo.

Why this matters

One of the coolest things about this whole story is that it’s all playing out in a coworking space at the N.C. Music Factory. DealCloud moved to Industry Coworking just a few months ago after being incubated at Packard Place.

AvidXChange is quickly becoming a major player in the tech space, and DealCloud co-founder and chief operations officer Rob Cummings said his company wanted to be in its orbit.

“We kind of see this gravitational pull over to the Music Factory,” he said. “There are cool technology companies and we wanted to be a part of that.”

The money is going to poured back into hiring people in Charlotte. Cummings said the investment was needed to put cash on the balance sheet to scale up the company: hiring sales people, development talent and operations analysts.

DealCloud does have an office in New York, and it makes sense to be there. If you’re selling to the financial industry, there’s none larger than the Northeast.

But Cummings said the company is still bullish on Charlotte and will do almost all of its hiring here. For one, it’s cheaper here. And he said the company feels good about the development and professional services talent already here.